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This article appeared in the Spring 2004 edition of Short Words, the newsletter of Tim Albert Training. It was written by Neville Goodman, who is a consultant anaesthetist in Bristol.

S Bigwood, M Spore, Presenting Numbers, Tables and Charts, Oxford: OUP, 2003

ER Tufte, The visual display of quantitative information, Connecticut:
Graphs Press, 1983

Plain words need plain numbers

Neville Goodman recommends a new book

A professional artist drew the illustrations for my thesis with Indian ink and pen. A professional photographer photographed her drawings, and those photographs were bound into the thesis.

Thirty years on, the computer has displaced both artist and photographer; they are no longer needed.

Or are they? Computer drawing programs have limitless but unnecessary flexibility; they do not have Jill and Sandy's expertise.

Not that Microsoft won't give you illustrations every bit as good as Jill and Sandy's, but you have to work at it. Sally Bigwood and Melissa Spore go a long way towards making that work easier in Presenting Numbers, Tables and Charts.

Their book is extremely simple, almost simplistic, but judging from some of the tables and charts one sees in medical publications, lots of people would benefit from reading it.

Edward R. Tufte coined the expressions 'data ink' and 'non-data ink' to contrast those parts of a diagram that convey information and those that don't.

Tufte has written some marvellous books - I recommend especially The visual display of quantitative information - and I was prepared to criticise Bigwood and Spore heavily if they did not cite him.

But he makes his first of many appearances on their second page, and they use his term 'chart junk'. Like Tufte, they are especially good at warning of 'legends, grid lines, colours, values, and other effluvia… junk at the expense of the message'. They warn that simplicity has to be worked for as you 'ruthlessly remove features that the program provides'.

They give simple sensible guidelines for ordering information within a table. It is all too easy to copy a table from a spreadsheet straight into a presentation, but the most logical order for entering the data is not always the same as for presenting it, when patterns and trends are important.

They are good, too, on how to make sure numbers are comparable when comparison is intended, and how rounding makes numbers more intelligible. They reminded me of the BBC's pointlessly precise description of the close opposition of Mars to the Earth in August 2003, when the distance was given as 34,646,418 miles.

But there is one important omission. The authors are explicit that statistics is beyond their remit, but a few pages on how to present variability within tables or graphs would have widened the book's appeal.

When writing articles, it is easy to think that the numbers and graphs will speak for themselves. Too often they do not speak clearly. Short words need short numbers. Bigwood and Spore give good advice, and £7.99 is extremely good value.

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